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The best performing titles that we've seen for me have been How I something.
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I think of you as the really smart friend that you know from school, who's like figured a bunch of stuff out, but the friend.
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When you explain something to a friend, you approach it in a very different way than if you're trying to perform being a YouTuber or perform being a writer. How do you balance that?
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Level one is get going, level two is get good, and level three is get smart.
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Quantity is more important than quality in the early days.
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Because the strategy, while you suck at execution, is completely pointless.
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But strategy, when you're good at execution, suddenly starts to make sense. I just love it. It's so good.
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What he said to me was like, if you had to nail it down to one secret, just the one thing that really helped you in your journey of productivity, what would that one thing be?
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And I said… One of the things that you have spoken about is the difference between how to and how I, in your writing process.
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And I know that you've struggled with perfectionism and stuff like that.
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How has that idea, that concept just helped you write?
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Yeah, so when I was working on my book for the first time, this would've been about three years ago, I got really stuck with the imposter syndrome thing around feeling like, who am I to write a book?
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Who am I to write anything?
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Why would anyone listen to what I have to say?
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And I was speaking to my writing coach about this and he said that this is a really common problem.
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A lot of writers get imposter syndrome.
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Even the people who have been doing it for decades still feel that sting of, oh, putting myself out there.
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I'm not sure what I have to say is good enough.
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And so the framing that he taught me was that there's a difference between being a guru and being a guide[a].
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And if you try and approach writing from being a guru, it's quite hard because for a lot of people, it makes you feel like you're the guru on the mountaintop and you have all the answers.
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And to be honest, for most of the things that we write about, there are no real answers.
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It's just things that have worked for some people that might work for the readers.
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And so shifting, thinking about it from being a guru to more of being a guide is how I approach writing, YouTubeing every single thing I do.
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I'm not imagining I'm the expert and I have the answers.
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I'm imagining, hey, I'm just a fellow traveler along the same path as the reader or the viewer and I'm just sharing the curiosities that I've learned along the way.
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And that's why when it comes to, for example, my YouTube videos, the best performing titles that we've seen for me have been ones where the title has been how I type really fast. Totally.
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How I rank first at Cambridge.
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That's your Cambridge piece. Yeah, exactly.
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It was actually really interesting.
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I was on your YouTube channel recently.
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I was looking at the best performing videos of all time, and a surprising percentage of them are really old, and they're basically how I did really well in medical school, how I figured out how to memorize this or that.
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And there's a few interesting things there.
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The first is around production value.
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Maybe it's not super important or maybe, I don't know.
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I think that's something that we can figure out.
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And then, another thing is there's a relatability in those videos of, hey, I just figured this out for myself and I'm just going to share what's working for me.
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And it'd be interesting to then figure out how does that translate into your writing, and then where do you struggle to get that into your writing?
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Yeah, so we're in the final week of editing for the book now and we've been going back and forth with the editors on the introduction, because the introduction is really the most important part of the book after the title and thumbnail, i. e. The front cover.
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And in the introduction, we're trying to figure out how to frame my expertise.
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So it's a book about productivity.
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And what the editor was saying is that in the past, he and the team at Penguin made a bit of a mistake in that they were trying to present me as a professorial authority that, "Hey, this guy's a doctor.
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This guy went to Cambridge.
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This guy's fancy, and therefore he has the answers."
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And they've realized that over the last few years of this journey and seeing how the YouTube channel has grown that actually we're not trying to present me as Daniel Kahneman.
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That's not the game we're playing.
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Instead, the game we're playing is of being a citizen expert.
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I'm just a random person who's just been obsessed with productivity for 15 years.
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And here's what's worked for me, maybe it'll work for you too.
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I think of you as the really smart friend that you know from school that you always go to whenever you need some study tricks who's figured a bunch of stuff out.
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But the friend, and someone who you can hang out with.
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That's a nice way of thinking about it.
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That's how I think about, I guess, teaching my audience on YouTube or in the writing.
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I start all of my videos with the phrase, "Hey friends[b].
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I start my newsletter with the phrase, "Hey, friends."
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And even just that sprinkle of...
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I guess some people might think it's contrived, but to me it really helps me frame the conversation in a way that, no, these are genuinely my friends. I'm not the expert.
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I'm just a guide who's helping out wherever I can. Totally.
4:50
You're talking about your writing coach.
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What's that relationship like?
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So in the early days of the book process, a mutual friend of ours, Pat Flynn, introduced me to a guy called Azul who became my writing coach.
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And I worked with him for about a year from getting the book through the proposal stages, putting the structure together.
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And it started off as, oh, I thought a writing coach is someone who will just keep you accountable and help you hand in and just set deadlines for you, essentially.
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But it turned out to be more of a therapist than anything else, because as I started the writing journey for the book, there were all these emotions and fears and insecurities that came up, and Azul was really good at navigating those and helping me in a very gentle way realize that, oh, this writing thing is hard, and it's okay.
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And it's okay if emotions come up, and we would talk through the emotions.
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So I thought of them more like therapy sessions rather than coaching sessions, as it were.
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Emotions[c], fears, insecurities. What came up for you?
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I think a lot of it, I can boil down to that phrase, imposter syndrome.
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Feeling like who am I to be writing a book about productivity?
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Who am I to be writing a book at all?
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A book is this thing, right?
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It's this thing that has gravitas.
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Whereas an email, a newsletter, who cares?
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A YouTube video, who cares?
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Even though a YouTube video is going to be seen by more people than will ever read the book, there is something about the medium of the book that I had a lot of fear around, and still have a lot of fear around to an extent.
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So I think the imposter syndrome was one part of it, and the other part of it was the expectation and the, oh, this really needs to be good. And what does good mean?
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Well, I'd really love for it to hit the New York Times Bestseller list because that is the badge of whatever.
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And what Azul helped me realize is that the way I've approached growing my YouTube channel for the first three years before I even entertained the idea of writing a book, it was all very much based on what are the things within my control?
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It's within my control to make a video every week and for myself to feel proud of the video.
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And I've never had any goal around subscriber count or around milestones or views or revenue or anything like that.
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And all of that stuff has happened as a side effect of showing up and doing the work and controlling what's within my control.
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Bill Walsh, I think his name is, says "The score takes care of itself."
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Whereas when it came to the book, I flipped that philosophy on its head and I was like, oh, this needs to be good.
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I want people to like it.
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I want it to hit the New York Times Bestseller list, which means it needs to get a certain amount of sales and all of that, and all of these are things that are outside of my control. Totally.
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And so, the thing I have to keep reminding myself and what Azul helped me and what the editors continue to help me with today is really focusing on, what's the point? Why are we doing this?
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And what's really the outcome I'm going for?
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And the outcome is I just want to write a book I'm proud of.
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And if I can write and release a book I'm proud of, in theory, that should be good enough.
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And then the school will take care of itself. Exactly.
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Yeah, it's funny, I was talking to a friend and I was talking through some different creative struggles that I was facing.
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And I was like, I want to be a creative force.
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I want to be a creative force. And he's listening.
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He's like, "Why do you keep saying that you want to be a creative force?" "What do you mean?
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Because that's what I want.
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And he goes, "Well, you've been a creative force in the past.
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When you were a creative force, were you walking around saying that you're a creative force?" I was like, "Oh no.
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I actually didn't say that one time ever."
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He's like, "Well, what was the thing that was driving you?"
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And I was like, "Oh, it's really simple.
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I would just get really interested in idea.
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Then I would try to figure out that idea for myself, and then I would try to explain it to others." That's it.
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He's like, "Oh, just do that.
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Stop worrying about being a creative force." And it's the same thing.
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It's the score will take care of itself.
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You're focused on a New York Times Bestseller list.
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I'm focused on this identity of being a creative force.
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Neither of those are useful.
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What's useful is writing a book that you're proud of.
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What's useful is just getting really interested in an idea.
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And Miles Davis has this line, a famous jazz musician.
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And he says, "Sometimes it takes a long time to be able to play like yourself."
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And I think about this all the time where, when you first get into a new craft, you just try to be this thing.
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You try to either be like your inspirations, you try to change who you actually are so that you can perform, so that you can be well liked, so that you can be good at whatever is happening.
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And I think that in jazz and writing and a lot of creative fields, just to get back to the person who you naturally are, but on the other side of skill.
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On the other side of hard work and dedication and being really analytical about your craft, I feel like that's where real excellence happens, and I just see both of us in these examples just trying to be this manufactured identity rather than just doing what we can do. Absolutely.
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This reminds me of a conversation I had with our mutual friend, Danny Miranda, a couple of days ago.
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We were talking about a struggle that I'm having right now, which is feeling a sense of apathy when it comes to making YouTube videos.
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I've been making YouTube videos for the last six years, they're literally the lifeblood of the business.
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And we brought our whole mini studio set up to Austin for a few days.
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And when it came down to filming a video, just haven't really been feeling it, as it were, for the last couple of weeks.
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We were exploring this and I realized that, just to your point, I'd been really hanging onto this ideal identity of wanting to be a thought leader for some reason.
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It's like whenever people ask me, "Oh, what's your goal for the business or whatever that thing?"
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I was like, "It'd be cool to be a thought leader."
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I don't know why I've become fixated on that phrase.
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But what Danny and I were talking about, he asked, "What does being a thought leader look like?"
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And I said, "Well, it looks like having thoughts and sharing them publicly and learning stuff, and reading things, and then synthesizing things and making videos and writing about them."
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And he was like, "So why don't you just do that?"
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And that really hit me hard because I think it's something that Austin Cleon and Seth Godin talk about as well, about doing the verb rather than being the noun.
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And in my effort to be the noun, to be a thought leader, I had gotten away from the thing that actually matters, which is doing the verb, which is having thoughts, sharing them, doing reading, making videos.
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And if I think, what do I want my life to look like?
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I don't want to walk around with a badge saying public fucking intellectual or anything like that.
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I want to walk around in life being able to learn things and then share them in whatever medium that looks like.
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And so if I focus on the verb rather than the noun, I found just having a wave of relief when he pointed that out to me.
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And I think that speaks to this thing that we're talking about.
11:49
One of the things that I find is if I'm just texting a friend and they ask me a question, and it's a good friend, I'll come back with sometimes a really interesting answer, but a funny way that I said it.
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There's a lot of personality and there's a wit that I can have when I'm just texting a homie.
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Whereas once I sit down to the computer, all of a sudden it's like, all right, posture up. Put everything down.
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Got to make sure it's good.
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This is going to be shared in public. Uh-oh. All that.
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And I feel like once there's a public display on, I will go from doing the thing, which is when I'm texting a friend, to then trying to be the thing, which is once I'm trying to write in public.
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There's a great moment I remember from a few years ago, this was back when I was working as a doctor.
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And I remember I was on a night shift and it was a little bit quiet.
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It was during the pandemic, so there weren't that many patients coming in for emergency stuff in the night.
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And a friend from med school randomly texted me saying, "Hey, I'm thinking of getting started with investing.
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You're the guy, you've done this investing stuff. Any tips?"
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And I started texting him on my phone, and then I got a bit, I can't type that fast on a phone.
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So I switched to a notepad window on the crappy Windows computers that the National Health Service uses in the UK, and I just started typing out how I would explain investing to this friend.
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And then I thought, hang on.
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Why am I doing this on Notepad?
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I opened up Notion, which is where I planned my YouTube videos, and I thought, if I'm just writing this, explaining it to a friend, let me just write it up as a potential YouTube video for further down the line.
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And so I typed out a bunch of stuff.
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This was in February of 2020, March of 2020, something like that.
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I typed out a bunch of stuff and then I sent it to him, and he was like, "Cool, this is super helpful."
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And then six months later I noticed that particular card was in my Notion video library thing, and I was like, huh.
13:43
How to get started with investing.
13:44
This is a pretty interesting video concept.
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And I'd already done 90% of the work in explaining it to my friend.
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And so we just added a few fact checks to see how much did the S&P return over the last 30 years and stuff.
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And I just made it as a video.
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And that has been one of the highest performing videos on the channel.
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It's got in the region of 8 million views, it's generated over a hundred thousand dollars in revenue, just that one video alone, and has generated tens of thousands of subscribers and continues to do so to this day.
14:08
And it's a video I made because a friend texted me, "How do I get started with investing?"
14:13
And it was tapping into exactly this thing that you're saying, when you explain something to a friend, you approach it in a very different way than if you're trying to perform being a YouTuber or perform being a writer. It's weird, right?
14:24
It's just weird how that performance blocks you.
14:28
I notice even when I'm trying to write formally, I can do about a thousand to 1500 words in a session.
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And a lot of times, very conscious of the clock.
14:40
But then, oh my goodness.
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If I'm a little angry about something, a little ticked, and I'll go in Slack and I can do a little rant, I can do that same word count in 25 or 30 minutes.
14:51
And I think there's a few things going on there.
14:53
First, the words, the language is tumbling out of me.
14:59
It's like the emotions are a gale force that are taking the words out of me.
15:04
It's not like some heady, very well-planned thing.
15:08
I often think that if you're surprising yourself[d] when you're writing, that is the conditions that you need in order to write well, because there's an authenticity and a realness to that that makes the words.
15:21
The reader can feel that.
15:23
And then also, I think that when you're writing to somebody, you don't have this, it's almost like a wall of mirrors.
15:30
What are all these people going to think?
15:32
What are all the different ways that this is going to be interpreted?
15:35
And there's a concept in writing that the universal is in the specific, and that if you can share a really specific example, something about that has a universal appeal.
15:47
And I think that in some ways it might be similar that if I can just write to one person, if I can just write to you, something about that feels so genuine that it also ends up paradoxically reaching more people.
15:59
Because sometimes you just read work that clearly is made for everybody, but it's diluted, it's watered down.
16:05
It's bland, it's vanilla, it's boring, and you just instantly, it takes two senses to know what's going on there as a reader and to tune out.
16:07
Yeah, I think that's so true.
16:08
But it's one of those pieces of advice, I've known that piece of advice for so many years, that speak as if you're talking to one person, write as if you're talking to one person.
16:15
I don't know how to follow it. Exactly. It's true. I think it's so true.
16:20
And I find in my life, the times where I accidentally do it, I'm like, oh, wow.
16:23
But consciously, actually writing as if it's just speaking to one person, that's something I really struggle with.
16:30
Even in terms of making videos where, especially as the numbers grow and there's this pressure and expectation of this video, it's going to get minimum a hundred thousand views, but hopefully 500 K, maybe even a million views. That's a lot of people.
16:44
And thinking about that- How many football stadiums is that? Yeah, exactly. All of that crap.
16:49
Thinking about that makes me generalize everything because I'm like, well, this example is too specific.
16:53
And what if this person's a student?
16:54
And what if they don't have a job?
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And what if they're a parent?
16:56
It's like, blah, blah, blah.
16:57
And then the whole thing becomes a bland and abstract because I'm trying to stay so high level to be applicable to everyone that it maybe sometimes loses the universality of it.
17:08
And one thing I noticed with a couple of videos recently where I had that thought in the back of my mind of just go deep, go specific. People really like it.
17:16
I did a video the other day which was 20 minutes long, had a lot of screen sharing, a lot of very specific instances about how I manage my time using a Google Sheet template.
17:26
And that video has been our highest performing video of the last six months. And it was so specific.
17:31
And I was so worried that this is not going to be applicable to anyone because if I show how I manage my time like, I'm an entrepreneur, I can do what I want.
17:38
Most people watching this aren't going to be able to manage that.
17:39
But people took their own lessons away from the specific example that I used.
17:44
And in the past, I would've been tempted to make that very general, but then it would've been watered down as a result.
17:50
So how'd you think about this as you were writing the book?
17:53
As I was writing the book[e], I was really imagining.
17:56
I heard this piece of advice from Tim Ferriss at one point where he said he was struggling to write the 4-Hour Workweek.
18:02
And then he decided, you know what? Let me just scrap it.
18:05
And he opened up a Gmail compose window and just wrote the first however many tens of thousands of words just as if he was writing to a friend.
18:13
And so I had that piece of advice in the back of my mind as I was working on the first draft, which was about a year ago, really just trying to play fast and loose with it.
18:23
And the thing that actually got the first draft done, I'd been struggling and procrastinating on it for absolutely ages, was I went on a team retreat to Wales and we got this big Airbnb with my team.
18:34
And the objective of the trip for the team was that we're not allowed to do anything that looks like work.
18:40
And so everyone had to work on a personal project or a hobby or something like that.
18:43
Whereas my task of the trip is that every single day I'm going to do the first draft of one of the chapters.
18:49
And so from morning to night, my only job that day was, I just need to finish this first draft of this particular chapter.
18:54
And the chapter is 10,000 words, so it was 10,000 words in a day. Every day? Every day.
19:00
Kept it up for seven days.
19:01
Managed to get about 70,000 words done, give or take, the first drafts of those chapters.
19:06
And it was because in that moment I was playing fast and loose.
19:09
I was like, you know what?
19:11
There's this other piece of advice I got from Safi Bahcall, I think, who wrote a book called Loonshots. Loonshots, yeah. Where he says, FBR. Fast, bad, wrong. FBR. Fast, bad, wrong.
19:21
And I was saying, it's got to be FBR.
19:23
If you want to get 10,000 words done in a day, it's got to be fast, it's got to be bad, and it's got to be wrong.
19:28
But that's okay because you get the 10,000 words. That's funny. I could never do that. There's no way.
19:32
If you give me $10 million, I would not be able to type 70,000 words in a week. I'm serious.
19:38
But one thing that I do that I think is similar is I use voice transcription all the time.
19:44
So if I need to get something out, often I don't run to the keyboard because I'm a slow typer.
19:53
You're a fast typer, but I'm a slow typer.
19:55
And so what happens is my brain will outpace my fingers, and so I can't actually in my writing a lot, just have that raw expression.
20:05
But what I can do is I can just speak into my phone, get it transcribed automatically.
20:11
And I use an app called Scribe, which I love.
20:13
It uses some fancy AI algorithm that they like to boast about that actually works incredibly well.
20:20
Way better than Siri, way better than any voice transcription I've ever had.
20:24
And then I get things out and then I just airdrop it onto my computer, and then I just have that on one side of my screen, and then I'll turn that into writing.
20:31
And I find that to just be really useful.
20:33
And also, I just really enjoy it way more than I enjoy just sitting down and getting a first draft out by typing it. Yeah, I'm the same.
20:41
I don't particularly enjoy the fingers to keyboard type situation.
20:45
And yeah, I've definitely started experimenting more with the transcription stuff as well.
20:51
How scripted are your videos?
20:51
[f] Is that something that you've played around with?
20:54
I think you've mentioned in the past, "We've tried scripted. I don't like scripted."
20:57
So how do you think about that?
20:58
Yeah, that's a good question. It's a mix.
21:01
Most of the videos are not very scripted at all.
21:05
We maybe script the first 10, 20 seconds for the hook because that needs to be tight and have loads of ideas as to what that first 20 seconds is going to be.
21:15
But then beyond that, usually the way I prepare my videos[g] is I have an A3 pad with a Sharpie, and I put the title of the video in the middle of the thing, and then I try and just draw a mind map or a spider diagram.
21:28
And I limit myself to somewhere between three and five points.
21:33
Occasionally it'll be seven or nine or 14 if I'm feeling really overboard.
21:35
But I try to limit myself.
21:37
For this topic, what are the three to five things I want to say?
21:40
And then those will be in the little boxes.
21:42
And for each of these three to five things, there'll be three little bullet points, offshoots of those.
21:46
And then as I'm filming the video, I'll be working through the bullet points and I'll be just riffing on those.
21:53
That's probably 80%, 90% of the content.
21:55
But then the other 10%, we are experimenting with more scripted videos, where one of my researchers can get involved if it's a topic where I don't have a lot of personal expertise.
22:06
We did a video on my evidence-based skincare routine.
22:10
That one did really well.
22:11
And it did really well, yeah.
22:12
We interviewed a dermatologist, took the transcript from that, found the soundbites, fact checked some of the staff, added a few studies, fact-checked it with another dermatologist.
22:19
That required a lot of scripting, and that was basically word for word scripted, where I knew exactly what I was going to say.
22:26
And so I'd look at the script and then I'd say the line to the camera.
22:28
Look at the script, say the line to the camera and try and make it sound natural, because I don't like how I come across in a scripted fashion.
22:38
And then, a handful of videos, we've actually played around with doing a teleprompter.
22:40
So maybe two or three videos.
22:42
And that's been much easier to film, but it's also, I have to keep in the back of my mind that I need this to sound natural.
22:47
And so that's always the trade-off, I think.
22:49
I sound very natural when I riff, which is most of my content, and it's very easy and it's quite fun.
22:53
But I think to unlock content that requires more scripting where I'm speaking about evidence stuff that I don't just have in my head, just trying to get that balance between teleprompter and coming across natural.
23:07
Every now and then you will come across some Reddit post that was clearly written by somebody at 11:45 on a Saturday night.
23:15
They got mad about something and they just went to the keyboard and they. Don't edit it. Don't even review it.
23:23
There's typos everywhere, and you can just feel the passion in whatever is being written there.
23:30
But some facts are wrong.
23:32
There's typos all over the place, but you can feel that.
23:35
And also, the density of content isn't always super high.
23:38
And then, there's another version which is really scripted, really refined, well-researched, evidence-based, but sometimes that doesn't have the energy and the realness that's coming out in writing.
23:52
And I just feel like there's some trade-off there.
23:55
But what I just am trying to figure out is how do you match the density?
24:00
Which I think density is a recipe for good communication, right?
24:03
Because you want to have a lot of personality, a lot of good ideas, a lot of good points in a small amount of words.
24:11
But then also, you don't want the compression to dilute your personality.
24:16
And how do you balance that?
24:18
That's the ongoing struggle.
24:20
We have the struggle with the YouTube videos where I tend to talk for longer than is reasonable about a thing, and then the editors are like, "Ugh.
24:29
Okay, we're trying to optimize for retention here."
24:31
So I'd repeat a few things, but in the repetition, there's a bit more nuance.
24:36
And so they're having to constantly play that game of, do we cut out this line or this 22nd segment, or do we keep it in?
24:43
And they're literally juggling that exact thing of, technically it reduces the density of information, but it does that personality.
24:51
And so, keeping those levers in mind.
24:53
But then also with the book where the first draft that we said we handed in was like 110,000 words.
24:58
And that is just unreasonable for a book.
24:59
And we're trying to get it down to 65 or 70,000 words.
25:03
And so there are a lot of areas in which I have been more personal and given personal examples, where the editors have said the personal examples are too unrelatable because they're either from medical school or from life as a doctor or from being a YouTuber, which are all very specific things that most people can't relate to.
25:22
Especially if we're trying to go after a mainstream audience, they'll get turned off by the whole, too many YouTube examples.
25:27
Dude, you're like a rapper.
25:30
Rappers start off and they're really relatable at the beginning.
25:35
Comedians are the same way.
25:36
They're really relatable at the beginning, and they have this life.
25:39
And they're talking to people and the people are like, "Yes.
25:42
The things that you deal with are exactly what I deal with. Wow!
25:47
There's such a strong connection."
25:48
And then, you become super successful and you're flying private jets.
25:54
You're performing in front of thousands of people.
25:59
And I think that what must be hard for rappers, for comedians is once you get that success, once you have all those things, how do you express yourself in a way that still feels relatable?
26:10
And I think this happens all the time.
26:12
No one's going to laugh at your joke about the funny things that happen in first class.
26:19
It's just not as funny or as relatable as I was sitting in row 34F on a flight and the person in front of me leaned their chair back and rocked my knee, my drink spilled, my laptop fell.
26:35
That's way more relatable, and this shows up all the time. Yeah, absolutely.
26:39
One of the things that we've realized in the book editing process is, I guess we're talking about how do we bring the personality across, but in a way that is still relatable without over egging on personal examples?
26:55
And the way that we're trying to do this is recognizing that personality can come across in the voice of the writing.
27:06
It doesn't only need to come across in the personal examples.
27:10
And so we've realized the way I write a paragraph with a little bit of dry humor, sometimes in the first person, here's what works for me.
27:22
That gives the writing a voicey personal feel, even if we've cut the example of, so when I was a YouTuber and I film videos in front of a camera, here's how I struggle with the thing.
27:32
And so that's the balancing act, figuring out how do we sprinkle in the voice without using too many unrelatable examples.
27:40
I think Paul Miller did a very good job of this.
27:43
Writing about himself, having voice, and doing it in a way where you can abstract lessons from his writing, where it doesn't feel so top down.
27:56
It feels like, hey, I just walked this path, this pathless path.
28:02
Now that you're a reader, you can follow this path.
28:05
Here's some things to look out for.
28:07
And it isn't very top down and authoritarian. It's much more like you.
28:12
Hey, I'm your friend who just did this.
28:15
And you might want to quit your job, and some things to look out for. That's true.
28:21
I really like Paul's writing because it's so personal.
28:25
But then, there's a study that came out recently that a friend linked me to, which was looking at the frequency of highlighted things and books and stuff on Kindle.
28:36
And they found that sentences that were you, that were addressing the reader, were way more likely to be highlighted than sentences that were I.
28:41
And I was like, goddamn it.
28:46
There goes my whole thesis about how I sentences are pretty good because people like personal.
28:52
And then I think of my own highlighting habits on Kindle.
28:55
I tend to abstract a lesson from a personal example, but I tend not to highlight it.
28:59
The thing I tend to highlight is the pithy, tweetable, therefore you should do X, or just an interesting way of framing or revealing the truth, which tends not to be personal.
29:10
And so again, that's again got me up quite up in this quagmire of what is this balance between the personal and the thing where you're telling the reader to do something?
29:21
That might be like an EDM show where...
29:24
Have you ever watched a video of only bass drops? No.
29:29
I don't even know what that means.
29:33
You know how it's electronic music.
29:35
It'll go, and then the bass will drop.
29:37
But there's the buildup and then the bass drops, and then everyone goes, "Yeah!." Okay.
29:42
I'll take your word for it.
29:44
But what's funny is if you watch a video, if you type in Ultra Music Festival 2017 best base drops, the video's not good. It's not good.
29:54
It's not pleasurable to listen to.
29:55
And the point is you need the buildup in order to get the base drops.
29:58
And so, even though the base drops are the big thing, if you only have base drops, it's not good.
30:03
And so that would be my worry about listening to that Kindle highlight advice too closely, is that might only be the case because there's dead time in other places. That's true.
30:13
That's a really good point.
30:15
The way I've been thinking about the Kindle highlight thing is we want to highlight at the end of every paragraph, or at the end of every two or three paragraphs.
30:21
So the paragraph is personal and stuff, and at the end of it, there's the pithy, tweetable summary of what's just been said.
30:28
And I find when I read books and they have just that final line, the final word on the thing, I'm like, yes.
30:33
Highlight, highlight, highlight.
30:34
But you're right, it does need the buildup, otherwise it loses impact.
30:37
It's the same thing with comedy.
30:40
The way that I think about a comedy set is you basically have some 60 to 75 minute theme, if you think of that as a line.
30:50
Then within that, you have all these two to five minute chunks that then all have their own narrative within them and then their own punchline.
31:00
But same thing with comedy.
31:02
The laughter comes because of the buildup before it.
31:06
And so there's a funny thing where, yes, more laughter is better.
31:11
But then, you can almost get to a point where if you have laughter every single second, it's like that doesn't really work.
31:19
There's a natural tension and release flow rhythm.
31:23
Yeah, that's a good way of thinking about it.
31:26
It reminds me of the criticism that a lot of nonfiction books will get of, "Oh, this could have been a blog post," or "This could have been a tweet thread," or something like that, where someone will take, I guess the punchlines, those little highlightable bits at the end of the paragraphs or the end of the pages.
31:42
We'll say, well, that was the point. Cool.
31:45
So well, why is this a book?
31:46
This person's just making a point and then fleshing it out with a bunch of superfluous examples and stuff.
31:51
And one thing I've been increasingly realizing is that, yes, you can read a short form summary of a book, and yes you can read this.
32:01
I just read Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.
32:04
Here's a summary of my key highlights, a thread. That kind of stuff.
32:07
And they'll get millions and millions of views.
32:10
But you lose something in not seeing the fluff, the buildup.
32:15
Just like a comedy set with just punchlines or a musical performance with just climaxes, it's not that interesting.
32:21
Similarly, you learn so much more when you have the mic drop moment or the bass drop moment after the appropriate buildup, so that you really feel the advice that's being given rather than just reading it in a Twitter thread.
32:32
Well, here's a very simple way to think about this. What do you like?
32:36
What is a book that you read and you're like, "I want to write a book just like that?"
32:40
I think most recent one has been The Psychology of Money, by Morgan Housel.
32:45
So what does he do well there?
32:47
What he does well there is that he's got a lot of chapters, 20 something chapters. 20 chapters actually.
32:52
He tells a short story in each one, and there is a message at the end.
32:56
There is a takeaway at the end of the short story, and it's just great.
33:01
It's very digestible, very manageable. I just love it. It's so good.
33:06
So that's really interesting. I just love it. It's so good.
33:09
Okay, so explore that for me.
33:12
What makes you say, "I just love it? It's so good."
33:15
You talk about stories, you talk about the digestible framework at the end.
33:21
Let's continue to excavate this. What's behind that?
33:24
It's effectively a listicle of just 20 somewhat unrelated lessons about money, which is just interesting, but there's a thread that ties them together, which is that money is about psychology, it's not just about the economics of the thing.
33:38
Now for each of these 20 different lessons, he's written it as if it's a blog post basically, which is each one is maybe 1500 words ish.
33:48
Something like that, 1500 to 2,500 words.
33:51
There is an interesting story.
33:53
The story is not necessarily of someone super famous or something, to the outside world, someone would think, "Oh, wow.
34:04
That's really interesting."
34:05
But it's an interesting story that speaks to something about human psychology when it comes to money that everyone can either relate to personally or that has seen someone else fall into that particular trap.
34:18
And then you've got his personal commentary and the timeless lesson at the end of it, which feels very satisfying because, oh, wow.
34:26
I feel like I've gotten that dopamine hit from learning something.
34:29
The story was engaging, so it kept me reading.
34:31
I've got the dopamine hit from the lesson.
34:33
And then, he always has a line at the end of each chapter that segues onto the next one, and that line makes you want to turn the page, and you go to the next chapter.
34:43
There's another story, and it's like we love stories, we love lessons.
34:46
And I think for something like The Psychology of Money, one way of approaching the book is writing it like Morgan Housel does, like a listicle of short stories and stuff.
34:56
Another way of approaching it would be, I guess, more like what James Clear did with Atomic Habits, where there is a thesis, i. e.
35:02
Tiny habits, remarkable results.
35:04
There is a four-part framework, or like the 4-Hour Workweek, four part framework of D-E-A-L.
35:09
Delegate, elevate, automate, liberate, whatever the thing was.
35:11
And you work through the framework.
35:14
And I think when you're being introduced to a topic for the first time, I wonder if the framework is better, because I'd never read a book about habits.
35:22
And so if it was just 20 disparate lessons about habits with stories, it's actually less useful than giving me a framework that I can follow to build better habits, queue craving, response reward, all that kind of stuff.
35:31
But I've read loads about money.
35:33
There isn't really a framework about thinking about money.
35:34
The psychology of money lends itself more to a listicle, bite size, oh, here's an interesting lesson. Oh, here's another one. Here's another one.
35:42
So I think those two different ways of approaching writing, I vibe with both of them.
35:44
But in the context of The Psychology of Money, I've really liked the listicle, blog posty way that Morgan Housel wrote it.
35:51
I want to hear about process of distillation and framing through how you got to feel good productivity. You didn't start there.
35:59
So what was the process that you used to get there?
36:01
I remember when we were together in London, you had the pilot, the plane, and the engineer.
36:05
And then you're like, "Oh, I dropped that.
36:06
This is where I've ended up now."
36:10
So this was a long journey of about three years.
36:13
Initially, when Penguin approached me in late 2020 to write a book, it was always going to be a book about productivity because that just makes sense.
36:22
And so we were trying to figure out what should the title be, and I just sent them some notes from an online course I'd made about productivity, where I talked about the productivity equation.
36:32
Productivity equals output divided by time, multiplied by fun, multiplied by directionality, or something to that effect.
36:42
And they were like, "Oh, yeah, this sounds cool.
36:43
Here's a book deal just off the back of the notes from this online course."
36:46
And so we got the book deal with Penguin UK then.
36:49
But when it came to actually writing up the proposal to pitch to US publishers, US publishers were not keen on just getting a random mess of thoughts.
36:57
So Penguin had a lot of faith in me at that point.
37:01
And so it took another year to figure out what is this book actually about?
37:06
And initially, it was the productivity equation.
37:08
The pilot, the plane, the engineer.
37:10
It was a metaphor going all the way through that productivity is really about these three things.
37:15
But then I spoke to a chap called David Muldaur, who is a book proposal list guy that James Clear worked with for the proposal for Atomic Habits.
37:23
And David, about a year into this journey, gave me a lot of tough love. He was like, "Look, man.
37:28
The productivity equation, it's not going to work." I was like, "Why not?"
37:31
He was like, "It's too complicated."
37:33
There's three different things.
37:34
Equation, the phrasing of that is boring.
37:37
Productivity itself is boring and it's dying as a concept.
37:41
Adding the word equation to it just makes it feel like, oh, this book is a lot of work to read.
37:47
And what he said to me was like, "you've got this whole journey.
37:51
You've been a doctor, you've done this whole YouTube channel.
37:53
You've built this seven figure business," blah, blah, blah.
37:56
"If you had to nail it down to one secret, just the one thing that really helped you in your journey of productivity, what would that one thing be?"
38:04
And I said, "Oh, that's easy. It was having fun.
38:06
I found a way to make it more fun, found a way to make things more enjoyable." And he was like, "Yes.
38:10
That is something we can work with.
38:12
That is an interesting message."
38:14
And so from that point on, the productivity equation shifted to being something around framing productivity as about having fun, enjoying the journey, enjoying the process, playing around with hundreds of titles like Austin Kleon's book, Steal Like An Artist.
38:29
Can we all show your work?
38:30
Can we do a phrase like that, make it fun?
38:34
Or make it easy, make it fun.
38:36
Or the joy of productivity, or joyful productivity, or fun productivity, or fun productive.
38:41
It's like unproductive, fun productive.
38:42
All of those different ideas we're playing around with.
38:44
Then after a bunch more work, a bunch more writing, getting our editors involved, we realized that the idea that, oh, to be more productive, just make it fun, it's too simple.
38:59
It's too simple so as to sound simplistic, and is easily then be like, oh, well not everything can be fun all the time.
39:06
It's very easily dismissible because it sounds childish that, "Easy for this YouTuber to say, just make it fun. Well, fuck you.
39:13
I've got a real job," kind of thing.
39:15
And then I dug into the science behind everything and started digging into the science behind all of this, spending loads of time reading research papers.
39:22
And realized that fun is just a subset of what's actually going on.
39:27
What's actually going on is that to be more productive and to do more of what matters to you, really the key is positive emotions, or positive affect as the scientists would call it.
39:41
And when you can experience positive emotions in your work or in your life, that generates energy, which makes you more productive.
39:47
But also, positive emotions are just inherently linked to productivity and happiness and success.
39:52
And the book by Sean Achor from Harvard professor is called The Happiness Advantage.
39:56
It's about how when you're happy in your job, that makes you perform better.
40:02
It's not that performing better makes you happy in your job.
40:04
It's that genuinely being happy in your job makes you perform better.
40:07
And so, the whole idea then became the thesis around this idea of experiencing positive emotions in our work.
40:14
And then, one day in the shower, I was thinking positive emotions, positive affect. Good vibes?
40:20
There was that book by Vex King called Good Vibes, Good Life.
40:22
And I was like, good vibes, productivity? Maybe that could be.
40:24
That's too plagiaristic, he's got Good Vibes, Good Life.
40:27
And also, it sounds a bit too millennial.
40:30
And then I was like, what's another word for good vibes? I was like, feel good.
40:33
Oh, feel good is another word for good vibes.
40:35
What about Feel Good Productivity?
40:37
And that was the first time that I felt like a title actually encapsulated the philosophy.
40:45
And then, when I got those words in my mind I was like, oh, that's actually been it.
40:50
This whole journey of med school, growing the YouTube channel, building the business, writing this book, it's all been with this idea of feel good productivity.
40:58
If you want to do more of what matters to you and do it in a way that's sustainable and without burning out, you want to find a way to experience positive emotions in the work.
41:05
And however hard the job might be and however boring it might be, there are always ways to sprinkle the feel good into it, to sprinkle the positive emotions, to sprinkle the fun.
41:14
But it's not just about fun, it's deeper than fun.
41:16
And that was the journey in a simplified way because we also experimented with dozen other different titles and none of them really worked until we got to this one. That's really good. That's really good.
41:28
I laughed when you said the shower, because that was so cliche. I know. It really was.
41:33
That's exactly how it came about.
41:35
It was funny because you gave a talk this week at a high school in Austin, and you were giving the talk and you're like, "Yeah, I don't even work that hard."
41:44
And I was like, hold on here, hold on here.
41:47
And I just looked at the entire high school.
41:49
I was like, okay, Ali works really hard.
41:52
But the fact that he says that he doesn't work hard is an incredible lesson in there.
41:58
And it's like the line from Naval Ravikant that I love, which is, do what feels like play to you, but looks like work to others.
42:05
And that's what you found. That's what you found.
42:08
And I think that when I look at you, I'm like, yeah, he's totally working hard.
42:13
And I remember when I was staying with you in London, you would be in the bathroom listening to an audiobook.
42:18
You were very determined about constantly learning, constantly thinking about things, working through ideas.
42:24
But for you, it's feel good, it's joyful, it's fun.
42:27
And that balance is what you figured out, and I think it's really helped you out well. Yeah. It's an ongoing journey.
42:35
There are times where it doesn't feel good.
42:37
But at those times, in the past I would've told myself that, oh, this is just discipline.
42:42
I would've been like, well, Jocko says discipline equals freedom.
42:45
And David Goggins says you got to suffer so much that your knees break, and then you'll succeed. And I'm like, okay.
42:50
In fairness, Goggins- Is that true?
42:52
Because discipline equals freedom is a great tagline.
42:54
I think about that a lot. So when is that true?
42:56
I think when it comes to doing stuff, there's three different approaches.
43:02
The first approach is the motivation approach, which is that if I'm sufficiently motivated, I will then do the thing.
43:08
There's this great video on YouTube.
43:10
It's this guru who's telling a story of this guy and he's like, "This guy, he wanted to get rich.
43:17
And so this guy, he goes up to a guru and he says, 'How do I get rich like you?'
43:22
And the guru asks him to come out to the beach four o'clock the next morning, and he says, 'I'll see you there.'
43:28
And the guy meets the guru on the beach and the guy says, 'Walk out into the water.
43:32
Walk out into the water.'
43:33
And the guy walks out into the water and he is like, 'Why is this guru making me walk out into the water? I want to be rich. Why in the water?' .
43:39
And he keeps on walking, and then the guru is behind him and puts his head down under the water, and he holds him down until his body is thrashing and he's nearly dead and something like that.
43:45
And then at the last moment, just as he's about to pass out, the guru lets him up for air and the guy takes a big breath in and the guru says, 'When you want to be rich so much, as much as you want to breathe right now, that's when you're going to have success.'"
43:57
I've watched this video way too many times.
43:59
I actually haven't seen it five years, but he says, "When you want to succeed as much as you want to breathe, that's when you'll be successful." Exactly.
44:12
So that encompasses the motivation method.
44:14
If you are sufficiently motivated to do the thing, you will then do the thing.
44:18
But a lot of people have motivation, or they have motivation at times, the motivation wax and wanes.
44:23
Motivation is one of those fickle things that is really hard to sustain forever.
44:26
And so you can want to succeed as much as you want to breathe, and that certainly works for some people, but it doesn't work for a lot of us.
44:33
And then, so the next stage up is, what's the solution to this?
44:37
And that's when discipline will often be invoked.
44:39
It's like, okay, well motivation is waxy and waney.
44:42
But when your motivation is low, that's when you've got to use your discipline.
44:45
And then you'll get words like discipline, willpower, grit, determination, perseverance, persistence.
44:51
All of those things then are invoked there.
44:54
And it's like, well, forget about motivation. Just use discipline. If you're disciplined...
44:58
There was a clip from David Goggins on Chris Williamson's show where Chris asked, it's four o'clock in the morning.
45:07
You wake up, and you want to stay in bed.
45:09
How do you make yourself get up?
45:10
And he was like, "That's exactly why.
45:13
I get up and I'm hating myself, and I'm like, I'm just going to do it. I'm just going to do it.
45:17
And that's the discipline."
45:18
And it's almost like this war with himself, this battle with his own mind to do the thing and be disciplined about it.
45:25
Again, I think that works for a lot of people some of the time, but a lot of people would say they struggle with discipline.
45:30
And I certainly struggle with discipline.
45:31
I don't think of myself as a very disciplined person.
45:34
And so, I've always been a bit like, motivation isn't quite the right answer because it wax and wanes.
45:40
And discipline isn't quite the right answer because I don't really want to be at war with myself.
45:44
So what's actually the way?
45:47
And the conclusion that I've come to and the one that I try and live by is that, A, trying to unblock myself.
45:55
I call it the unblock method.
45:57
Figuring out why I'm feeling like not doing the thing.
46:00
Where are the barriers coming from? Is it fear? Is it anxiety?
46:04
Is it uncertainty, lack of clarity about what I'm actually trying to do?
46:07
Is it just the inertia of not having gotten started yet?
46:10
And then once I've gotten started with, it's about trying to make the process enjoyable so that, yes, maybe while I'm at the gym, I don't quite feel like going for that extra rep, but can I use strategies and mindset shifts to try and enjoy the process rather than essentially bludgeoning my brain into disciplining myself?
46:31
I think there's a way to have your cake and eat it too.
46:34
And sometimes you need a dose of discipline, but I think you need a dose of discipline to get started with the thing.
46:39
Sometimes with the best intent in the world, you've got full clarity on exactly what you need to do, you've addressed any of your underlying insecurities, and you're sitting down to write or you're sitting down to film, and you just can't bring yourself to get started.
46:54
That's where a dose of discipline of just like, you know what?
46:56
I'm just going to write for five minutes. That helps.
46:58
But then beyond the five minutes, I think what sustains it is the positive emotions, the feeling good, approaching it in a playful sense.
47:04
Feeling a sense of autonomy, control, power, ownership.
47:07
All of these good feelings start to happen when we start to get this flywheel of feeling good, generating energy, being productive.
47:12
And at the end of it, we're like, damn.
47:14
I'm so energized by that.
47:16
And that's what some people might call the flow state.
47:18
And I think that there's a difference between today I need to be disciplined in order to do what I need to do.
47:25
I'm feeling a little tired, and today I just got to keep going.
47:29
There's a difference between that and every single day I'm trying to kill myself to basically get in the gym, to make sure to get my writing done.
47:37
If every single day you need to be doing that, there's something off.
47:41
That's a challenge and I think you need to investigate that.
47:43
But I think back to, a very dear friend sent 30 emails in 30 days.
47:44
It was awesome because I felt like I really got to know him in a way that I would've never gotten to know him otherwise.
47:46
And he got to day 30 and he was like, "I don't like doing this, and I'm going to stop doing this.
47:48
I don't like writing like this."
47:49
And he had a great line in there and he said, "What I did learn from this though is by trying to be disciplined in this area, I learned what are the things that I do that are still productive that I do without even trying?"
47:52
Where actually, if he didn't get an email, I think he owed all of us a hundred bucks.
47:53
And he said, "What are the things that I would still do even if I would have to pay you if I did do them?
47:55
What are the things that I'm still doing?"
47:56
And he basically listed out some things.
47:57
And as the friend group, we just said, go do those things.
47:58
Now we know what you should be doing.
47:59
And I just love that question.
48:00
What are the things that if I had to pay you $500 every time I did them, I would still feel the urge to go do those things?
48:02
Whereas discipline is the opposite, which is, I don't want to do this.
48:03
I'm going to pay you money if I don't do it. Yeah. Nice.
48:06
That's a really good way of putting it.
48:07
I think something like discipline works really well in small doses.
48:08
But relying on discipline is, at least for me, a recipe for unhappiness.
48:09
And most people, once they become successful, whatever metric you used to define it, they tend not to say all of the pain was worth it for this one moment.
48:11
Or maybe they do for a few minutes, and then they'll be like, "Okay, crap. What now?"
48:13
And you'll get all these Olympic athletes that won the gold medal when they were young, and now they feel purposeless and they don't have anything to work towards.
48:16
And as Miley Cyrus says in a song, it's the climb.
48:19
It ain't about how fast you get there.
48:21
Ain't about what's waiting on the other side. It's the climb.
48:23
Can you sing that for us?
48:24
Ain't about how fast I get there.
48:26
Ain't about what's waiting on the other side. It's the climb. Something like that. I lost my voice. Doesn't really work. It's about the journey. It's about the climb. Totally. It shows up everywhere.
48:38
One of the things that I've been dying to hear from you is you've spent so much money and time on hiring different coaches.
48:44
What have you learned about that process, how to find good coaches, how to hire them?
48:49
How do you think about that?
48:51
Yeah, I've spent a lot of money on coaches in the last few years and I wish I had started way earlier than that.
48:58
It's probably been the single highest ROI thing that I've ever done, I suspect.
49:04
It's just really helpful, and to me, it almost seems like a no-brainer.
49:09
If you want to get better at tennis, you would hire a tennis coach.
49:11
Yes, you can watch all the YouTube videos.
49:12
Yes, you can play with your friends.
49:14
But the day I hired a tennis coach, I was like, oh, okay.
49:20
This is how you really accelerate your improvement at tennis, because there is a guy there.
49:25
We're both here to serve me fundamentally.
49:28
He is working on my time, so I can find a time that suits me. He is broadly available.
49:33
He's got a bucket of 100 balls.
49:35
He's really good so he can reliably return the ball.
49:38
He's really good so he can reliably feed the ball into exactly the location where I need it to practice my backhand or my slice or whatever the thing might be.
49:45
And wow, I've just been improving so much faster.
49:49
I'm getting in way more reps and getting the feedback way quicker and also getting expert advice from someone who knows it, rather than if I was trying to play with a friend, we're spending half the time trying to grab the ball.
49:58
The ball goes into the net.
49:59
Neither of us is sufficiently good to be able to sustain a rally for more than 10 balls, whereas this guy can return any shot. It's just a no-brainer.
50:06
And so similarly in the world of business, in the world of growing a business, managing a team, leading a team, all of that stuff has been done by people before me and before whoever's reading this or watching or listening to this.
50:20
And having a coach who's been there and done that just really accelerates the learning curve for so much stuff in business.
50:28
And it was a mentor rather than a coach in that I wasn't paying him at the time, who encouraged me to hire my first employee.
50:35
He's the guy who encouraged me to outsource my video editing for the first time two years into the journey of my YouTube channel.
50:40
And that one decision, to outsource video editing, completely transformed my channel, the decision to hire a full-time employee, when I could only just about afford it.
50:50
He said, "Look, trust me.
50:51
When you have a full-time employee on your team, you're going to find things for them to do and I'd guarantee your revenue's going to go up."
50:55
Immediately within two or three months, we started making online courses, and boom, our revenue skyrocketed. That's really good.
51:02
Tell me about some of your emotional journey of your relationship with your family through the lens of, I'm not going to be a doctor, which is what my family wants me to be.
51:14
I'm going to make YouTube videos.
51:17
You know that you have the potential for a life doing that that you would never have as a doctor.
51:24
And the vast majority of people that you met in medicine didn't even their jobs that much, and yet there's this social pressure, this cultural pressure to go do that.
51:32
How have you managed that?
51:33
I think that's really common for people who want to break free of the traditional world of corporate life or medicine and go do their own thing.
51:43
Yeah, this was a real struggle back in the day.
51:46
It's become less of a struggle now because I've been out of medicine for a while now.
51:50
Because I've been crushing it.
51:51
Because I've been crushing it. Yeah, exactly.
51:54
Honestly, it's one of those things, I don't think I really realized how much their family and societal expectations were contributing to my decision to stay in medicine. They weigh on you, man.
52:06
And when I was being interviewed on Lewis Howes's podcast, School of Greatness.
52:10
This was a remote interview that we did. I just moved to London.
52:14
He was interviewing me about productivity and passive income.
52:17
And we touched on this idea of medicine.
52:19
And he asked, what does my dream life involve?
52:21
I was like, oh, I'd like to work as a doctor and then do the YouTube thing.
52:25
And he was like, "Why do you want to work part-time as a doctor?
52:28
You've got way more success as a YouTuber." And I rationalized it.
52:32
I was like, "Oh, because I think my brand is more valuable if I'm a doctor as well, and people follow me because a doctor.
52:36
I don't want them be them to unfollow me now I'm just a YouTuber."
52:40
And he was like, "Hang on, hang on, hang on. Let's explore this."
52:43
And we spent about half an hour in this interview where he was meant to be interviewing me about productivity advice, more like where he became my life coach slash therapist, and we on air explore this idea.
52:53
And I realized that it was a real scarcity mindset that was holding me back.
52:59
It was this idea of like, oh, medicine is a prestigious career, medicine is a stable career.
53:04
The YouTube career does not have any longevity.
53:07
I'm popular right now, but who knows if I'm still going to be popular next year?
53:11
It's ultimately a popularity contest at the end of the day. Blah, blah, blah.
53:15
And what he really challenged me on, it was two things.
53:18
Number one was the money, and number two was the passion.
53:21
So on the money side of things, what he challenged me on, he was like, "Okay, let's say your YouTube channel crumbles.
53:26
You have nothing, and all you have is your laptop and the skills that you've already got.
53:30
How long would it take you to make 100 K a year?"
53:31
I was like, "Oh, probably two years."
53:34
And he was like, "That's pretty good."
53:36
But he bet that it would be more like three or six months rather than two years.
53:40
And I was thinking about that and I realized, yeah, the skills that I've gained through building this business and this channel are skills that will stay with me forever, fingers crossed, and I actually could make money if I needed to.
53:52
And so then he asked me, "Okay.
53:55
If you knew you could make 100 K doing your own thing, would you choose to go back into medicine?"
53:59
And I was like, "Well, hell no.
54:00
If I could do my own thing, of course I'd just do my own thing."
54:04
And then there was the passion piece to it where he was like, "If you could design your life however you wanted, would you spend any time in a hospital?"
54:12
And I was like, "No, I actually wouldn't." I tried it.
54:15
I tried doing part-time work, but every half an hour I was thinking I'd much rather be hanging out with my team right now making videos, feeling creatively fulfilled.
54:23
And then that conversation made me realize that all the stories and narratives and rationalization I'd be telling myself about why medicine was the smart choice was actually just fear holding me back.
54:32
It was the fear of not making enough money.
54:33
It was the fear of being seen as a sellout because I left a altruistic gig for the purpose of a moneymaking gig.
54:47
It was the fear that the only reason people are following my YouTube channel is because I'm a doctor who does stuff on the side.
54:54
If I stop becoming a doctor and become a full-time YouTuber, that's less interesting.
54:57
No one's going to follow me anymore. My life will crumble.
55:00
I'll become homeless and broke.
55:01
That was the thought process.
55:03
And then underlying all of this was probably, and I haven't fully explored this yet, but I'm sure there was some aspect of I want my mom to be proud of me.
55:11
Parents ultimately want what's going to make the kid happy over the long term, but I think especially from an immigrant background, my mom's a doctor as well, stability is the key thing, and medicine gives you stability.
55:23
And from her perspective, she's really worried.
55:25
What is this YouTube career? It's not very stable.
55:27
What if you're going to end a broken homeless, kind of thing?
55:29
And so I realized that it was that fear that was transplanted into me where I was genuinely worried like, oh crap.
55:36
If my YouTube channel dies, I'm going to be broken homeless.
55:39
But actually, Lewis shining a light on that and actually saying it out loud made me realize, now hang on, that's a pretty unrealistic outcome.
55:46
And even if the YouTube channel does die, I'd way rather just start another business or get a job with any of my friends, then I would go back to working in a hospital for 60 hours a week.
55:56
So those fears were all there.
55:58
And still to this day, there's part of me that almost has to apologize for it, I feel, where if I'd left a corporate career or corporate law, I feel like I wouldn't really care because, what else?
56:09
But the fact that it's medicine, the fact that I have given up what is an altruistic thing, where doctors in the UK don't earn very much money.
56:18
They're currently on strike this week to try and campaign for wage increases.
56:22
Most of my friends are still in medicine and genuinely saving lives.
56:26
And I've given all of that up for the sake of, to my mind, making silly videos on the internet that are just making me rich beyond my wildest dreams, although my friends are struggling to get by, but doing the good work, doing God's work of medicine.
56:39
That still plagues me a little bit, and I haven't really fully figured it out in terms of...
56:47
Obviously for my quality of life, it's great and I can intellectually rationalize to myself that I'm having an impact on people's lives and blah, blah, blah, videos and leverage and stuff.
56:56
But that is still part of me that's like.
56:59
It feels like not the thing that a good person would do, to leave medicine for the sake of a very high paying YouTuber career. Yeah.
57:10
I know you love this book, Show Your Work.
57:14
Talk me through what about it was so game-changing for you?
57:18
This is one of the most life-changing books I've ever read.
57:21
Probably the single most life-changing book I've ever read was The 4-Hour Workweek, by Tim Ferriss, and that was the book that got me on the path of realizing that I could build a business on the side while doing med school, and that could potentially make money and I potentially didn't even have to put that many hours into it.
57:33
But then Show Your Work was probably the second most impactful book.
57:37
So essentially, since 2010, I had wanted to start a personal blog because I'd been reading a bunch of personal blogs.
57:46
I was a fan of Life Hacker and I think I'd discovered Seth Godin's blog years ago.
57:50
I was like, oh, having a personal blog would be cool.
57:52
I would love to write on the internet.
57:54
This was before your Ultimate Guide To Writing Online was a thing, this was before any of these courses existed.
57:59
I'd wanted to start writing online.
58:01
And five years later I somehow discovered this book.
58:04
I have no idea where I discovered it.
58:05
It might've been on a life hack article or something or in someone else's blog.
58:08
But then I read this, and it's a really short book.
58:10
It's not that many pages, it's mostly an illustrated picture book thing.
58:15
And I read this and immediately this was the book that made me realize, okay, I'm going to start writing online and actually do the thing, because this book basically taught me[h] that the thing that was holding me back was the fear of what I have to say isn't valuable enough, all of the imposter syndrome type things.
58:34
But then what Show Your Work taught me is that 10 ways to share your creativity and get discovered, well, it's basically that you don't have to be a genius.
58:41
You don't have to be the guru. You can be the guide.
58:43
It doesn't quite use that terminology.
58:44
But as long as you document the things that you know or the things that you've done and you're showing your work, that means you can put yourself out there and you can publish things.
58:55
And maybe someday people will read those things and then in the future they might buy your product, whatever the thing might be.
58:59
The way you get discovered is by showing your work and by putting it online.
59:02
I was like, that was the sort of firmware update I needed.
59:06
Before I was like, oh, I need to create a long form blog post that's got a lot of value in it.
59:13
Afterwards I was like, I just need to show my work. How hard can that be?
59:16
And this philosophy, for the last eight years now since discovering this book, it's still the philosophy of my YouTube channel. It's show your work.
59:22
It's not how to manage your time, it's how I manage my time.
59:25
It's in a way still the philosophy of the book, which is hopefully coming out in about six months.
59:30
It's like, hey, here's what worked for me, and here's a lot of evidence that it might work for you too. Maybe give it a go.
59:36
It's fundamentally the philosophy of Show Your Work. I think it's great.
59:38
One of the things that you often say, which has definitely come from that, is prolific over perfect.
59:45
I teach this course for YouTubers, the Part-Time YouTuber Academy, and we've had a 3000 students go through this so far.
59:52
And the thing that's most surprised me about this is how everyone struggles with perfectionism and everyone struggles with the fear of what their friends and family will think if they start making YouTube videos.
1:00:03
And I completely underestimated this.
1:00:06
I thought this was just a problem that high school kids would have.
1:00:08
They're like, "Oh, my friends are going to bully me if I start making YouTube videos."
1:00:12
But there's management consultants, there's partners at senior law firms.
1:00:17
There's senior managers at Google taking the course who are struggling with what their friends and family and colleagues are going to think if they start a YouTube channel. Of course.
1:00:26
And one of my theories around this is that if you are successful in a domain of life, then you want to be successful in every other domain of life.
1:00:35
If you are a hotshot entrepreneur or if you are a big manager in your firm and then you start making YouTube videos and you suck, you're going to feel the pain of that and you're going to worry that other people are going to see the pain of that because you've got this veneer around you, this shroud of authority and kudos and gravitas around you.
1:00:53
But when you start a YouTube channel, everyone is crap when they first start a YouTube channel.
1:00:59
And so this perfectionism[i] trap, wanting to be perfect, wanting the quality of the videos to be just really high from day one, is a thing that holds so many people back.
1:01:06
And I'd say probably of the 3000 people that have taken the course, at least a thousand probably still haven't published more than five videos because they've just been so held back by the sense of, oh, the video needs to be good.
1:01:20
And so every single session I try and hammer home, I try and tell the stories about, guys, prolific is better than perfect.
1:01:26
Quantity is more important than quality in the early days, because quantity leads to quality.
1:01:32
If you want to get good at something, you have to put in the reps.
1:01:33
The parable of the pottery class from James [inaudible 01:09:19]'s book. All of these things.
1:01:38
You've got to put in the reps in order to get good.
1:01:40
And then once you're good, then you can worry about the quality all you like.
1:01:43
But even then, obsessing about quality holds you back.
1:01:46
And so, prolific over perfect. Get going then get good. That's the one. Get going then get good. It's so good. I love that phrase.
1:01:52
It comes from Jack Butcher.
1:01:55
And the thing that we always say with Right of Passage students is we're going to assign you five pieces and we want to do everything we can to get you to publish five pieces in five weeks.
1:02:05
And then, now we have a program called Runway, which is 12 weeks and two sprints, two five week sprints with a break in the middle, and you publish every single week.
1:02:07
And so it's just publish, publish, publish.
1:02:08
And I think that people will spend so much time trying to figure out what's the right answer, what's the best platform to publish on?
1:02:12
I'm sure there's equivalents for YouTube.
1:02:15
And they'll get so bogged down in the strategy that they'll forget to just do the actual work.
1:02:20
And doing the actual work, showing up and doing the damn thing, is the most important thing by far. That's the one.
1:02:28
The three part framework[j] we teach on our course, level one is get going, level two is get good, and level three is get smart.
1:02:34
And strategy comes in level three.
1:02:37
And worrying about what my niche is going to be comes in level three and worrying about monetization comes in level three. That's really good.
1:02:43
Get going, get good, get smart. I really like that.
1:02:45
And people are so held back.
1:02:46
Before they've even got going, they're worrying about strategy.
1:02:48
They're worrying, "Is my niche too crowded?"
1:02:49
They're worrying, "Why would anyone care what I have to say?" No, let's get going, i. e.
1:02:53
Start just making some videos, and then let's get good.
1:02:57
So make videos or write about whatever you want.
1:03:00
And you're good at the point where you no longer cringe at your own content.
1:03:02
And at that point, you're good. Cool.
1:03:05
That might be 10 videos for some people, it might be 50 videos for some people.
1:03:08
But at that point, let's get smart and worry about the strategy, because the strategy while you suck at execution, is completely pointless.
1:03:15
But strategy when you're good at execution, suddenly starts to make sense. Yeah, that's funny.
1:03:20
Cringe at your own content.
1:03:21
What's going on with that?
1:03:22
There's two ways to think about what creates cringe.
1:03:26
The first is my quality bar is here, but I'm only able to make stuff that's this good.
1:03:32
So I'm annoyed at my stuff because it's not as good as what I think is really good, but I don't know how to get there. That's one.
1:03:43
And then, the other element of cringe is, I always think of old people and high frequency sounds.
1:03:50
There's really high frequency sounds that old people can't hear, and then young people or dogs will be like, "There's that sound.
1:03:58
There's that sound," and they can hear it.
1:03:59
And it is there, it is in the ether, but you can't hear it.
1:04:04
And I think that a lot of stuff that's cringe, it's like that.
1:04:09
Something is happening and somebody doesn't have the taste or the awareness to realize what that thing is missing.
1:04:15
And so, to someone who has a more trained eye, they see it right away.
1:04:19
And to somebody else, they're like, "What are you talking about?"
1:04:24
So within get good, there's two different barriers that I think of.
1:04:27
There's the internal quality and then the external quality.
1:04:29
So the internal quality is, I know my videos are good when I no longer cringe at them myself.
1:04:35
So that is probably because either my standards have come down as I've realized how hard it is, or hopefully at the same time, my own ability has gone up to the point where, the way I say to my students is, if one of your coworkers came up to you and said, "Oh, I saw one of your YouTube videos the other day."
1:04:53
Would you feel, oh my God? Oh, I can't believe it. Run!
1:04:58
Yeah, would you feel that?
1:04:59
That's you cringing at your own content.
1:05:00
Or would you feel, "Oh, cool. How was it?"
1:05:02
And when you get to the point where you're like, "Oh, cool. How was it?"
1:05:06
At that point, you're ready for the strategy.
1:05:08
You're ready to evolve to level three.
1:05:10
But as long as you continue to cringe at your own content, there's more work to be done in improving your craft and dealing with your own emotions and insecurities, and strategy does not solve those problems.
1:05:20
So that's internal quality.
1:05:21
But then there's external quality, which is where your videos are starting to get some amount of traction, some amount of views, likes, comments, subscribes.
1:05:29
And comments I think are the good one where even on a video with 20 views, if it's helpful and genuinely useful to someone, they might comment and be like, "Oh wow, this was really helpful."
1:05:39
That's when you get those indicators of product market fit.
1:05:41
That's when you've got the external metric for good.
1:05:43
And so, at the point where your videos either pass the internal quality bar or the external quality bar, one of those, at that point you're ready to think about strategy. But not until then.
1:05:52
How much in your writing, in your YouTube videos, are you still thinking about discovery focused content and conversion focused content?
1:05:59
How do you think about, I want to grow my audience first, I want to build my product?
1:06:04
I want to provide value to people, versus I want to then do more of a marketing or sales pitch? Yeah, good question.
1:06:17
We think about them all at the same time.
1:06:20
So the way we think about it is the one metric that matters for our entire business, if we think on a weekly cadence, is weekly or monthly views.
1:06:28
And so the objective as it were, is to get weekly view or monthly views as high as possible.
1:06:34
I personally don't like to think about this because my whole thing is I just want to make content that I'm proud of and stuff.
1:06:38
So it's like, there's this almost separation I have to do in my own mind of thinking like the business owner who cares about the metrics and thinking as the creative who does not want to care about the metrics.
1:06:50
But fundamentally, the thing we care about is views.
1:06:53
Now, we also want to generate sales from our stuff, and sales might mean for our course or it might mean for the book in the future.
1:06:59
And the one vehicle that generates all the sales is the email list.
1:07:02
I saw you're at 300,000 people on your email list.
1:07:04
Yeah, we were at 200,000 last month.
1:07:06
And then we did a few things, a few sensible things like lead magnets, and now we're at 300 K.
1:07:12
From your YouTube channel? Yeah. Good stuff.
1:07:15
And I'm like, damn, I wish we'd done lead magnets three years ago.
1:07:17
But views is the main thing.
1:07:19
And so, we're aiming for the content to be discoverable.
1:07:23
We want new people to discover the content.
1:07:25
But at the same time, we also want existing fans to enjoy the content.
1:07:30
And so we sprinkle in Harry Potter references and little Easter eggs, and I try and make the personality come across as authentic and have a few rituals like, "Hey friends, welcome back to the channel."
1:07:41
It's a thing that the existing fans can latch onto.
1:07:44
And then once a month, in addition to the eight videos we'll produce that month, we'll do a more personal or chatty video where I'm not expecting that to be discovered by anyone other than just interesting for some of my existing audience.
1:07:55
So most of our content aims for breadth in terms of widening the audience, discoverability.
1:08:02
Sometimes 10% of the content will aim for just developing that relationship.
1:08:04
But every single piece of content now is increasingly starting to have a plug to the email list in some capacity.
1:08:10
And usually, that's through some sort of lead magnet.
1:08:12
So before filming every video I'm thinking, what is a really good free thing that I can give away as an accessory to this video that will encourage people to click on the link and potentially enter their email address?
1:08:23
So do you make new lead magnets for every video? Pretty much.
1:08:26
Or if we really can't think about it, we'll plug an old one and find a way to segue into the thing.
1:08:31
This is relatively recent.
1:08:32
This is why in the last month we've gone from 200 K to 300 K, because we've actively thought about this that, oh, we want every video to basically have an email plug on it.
1:08:41
So the views go to the email list.
1:08:43
And then, we don't really sell on the YouTube channel.
1:08:44
We only ever sell to the email list.
1:08:47
And that is great because these are people who have opted in to getting emails from us.
1:08:51
And then within that, occasionally in my weekly newsletter, I'll say something like, if I mention, hey, I was in Austin for the Kajabi conference and had a great chat with David Perell, where we talked about this, writing and growing a YouTube channel.
1:09:04
BTW, if you're interested in potentially starting or growing a YouTube channel, click here and I'll send you a free seven-day email course. Boom.
1:09:11
They click on that link, one click, and now we've segmented them into, this person has expressed an interest in starting a YouTube channel. Sick.
1:09:18
Now that person is going to get a few emails sprinkled out around just giving them loads and loads and loads of value.
1:09:24
And if they engage with those emails, we'll start sending more emails, giving loads and loads of value.
1:09:29
And this is an idea got from you, we've got our 30 days email sequence that just provides tons and tons of value about how to do a YouTube channel.
1:09:36
And in some of those emails we say, "By the way, we have a course."
1:09:39
And so the videos, the content is all about discoverable, getting people onto the list.
1:09:43
And the point of the list is to continue that relationship with the audience in a platform that we own, but that we can also sell to without worrying about spamming the YouTube channel with salesy type stuff.
1:09:54
You used the word, creatively fulfilled, a few minutes ago.
1:09:58
What are some of the things that you've done that have given you the most creative fulfillment?
1:10:02
Learning stuff and then applying it to my life, and then sharing it online in some capacity.
1:10:06
I get a lot of creative fulfillment out of making- That's what I said earlier. Exactly.
1:10:09
Remember I said, hey, I get interested in something.
1:10:11
I apply it to my life, I figure it out, and then I share it with other people. That's the one.
1:10:15
That's so creatively fulfilling.
1:10:16
These days, I genuinely look forward to Mondays.
1:10:18
I'll get up on a Monday morning, I'll get in the shower, I'll do my skincare routine, and I feel a palpable sense of urgency because I can't wait to get started with work.
1:10:29
I can't wait to go into the studio room where Angus and Tinton and Bav and Saf are there and I'm hanging out with the team.
1:10:34
And so we're going to film something and then we're going to have a little chat where we plan out the videos.
1:10:38
And it feels so fun, so creatively fulfilling.
1:10:43
Writing the book has been very creatively fulfilling, so I definitely want to do more writing.
1:10:47
Even interviewing people on my podcast is great because I interview people that I want to learn from.
1:10:54
And now I have access to people who I can learn from that I wouldn't have been able to access otherwise.
1:10:57
And so I ask all the questions I want to ask and I learn from it, and then we turn it into a YouTube video.
1:11:01
All of this stuff just brings me so much joy and energy.
1:11:04
And even though I quite enjoyed medicine, I never looked forward to Mondays.
1:11:08
And I used to think looking forward to Mondays is a pipe dream.
1:11:11
No one looks forward to Mondays, because it's a job at the end of the day, right?
1:11:14
But now I genuinely do, and I hopefully want to keep that going.
1:11:16
Is there a project that you dream of taking on someday, that you don't feel like you're ready to take on, but in the back of your head it's like, I would really like to do that eventually?
1:11:19
I don't really have any major goals beyond I want to keep doing what I'm doing, keep feeling creatively fulfilled, looking forward to Mondays and get married and have kids and stuff.
1:11:22
There's cool things I'd like to do.
1:11:23
It would be cool to make an app, a productivity app.
1:11:24
It would be cool to make my own set of tech keyboards and backpacks and stuff.
1:11:25
It would be cool to continue doing talks and things like that.
1:11:26
But no, I don't really have any big moonshot that I'm striving for in a way.
1:11:27
I think that's the score, takes care of itself, showing up again.
1:11:28
You're very much a day-to-day guy. Yeah. Ali, that was fun. Thank you. Good sesh.
1:11:33
[a]Clip 6 60 sec YT Short "Guide vs Guru" [b]Clip 4 60 sec YT Short "Hey Friends" [c]Clip 7 Few minutes "Imposter Syndrome" [d]Clip 8 Few minutes "Specific Examples" [e]Clip 9 Few minutes "Writing a book" [f]CLIP 10 Few minutes "Prepare my videos" [g]CLIP 1 60 sec YT Short "Prepare my videos" [h]Clip 5 60 sec YT Short "Show Your Work" [i]Clip 3 60 sec YT Short "Perfectionism" [j]Clip 2 60 sec YT short "Framework"